The era of Big Data might revolutionize the process of business decision-making and strategizing the way many pundits predict. Or it might not.
Making such big-picture predictions based on the motivations and activities of businesses is a risky undertaking.
In either case, the extreme focus on gathering, analyzing, and basing decisions on key data is transforming organizations that understand the power of data to reveal flaws and opportunities.
For years, maintenance and engineering managers have used key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge department performance. They have filled their KPI dashboards with a host of measurements related to rates of equipment downtime, inventory costs, percent of emergency work, and mean time between failure. But as advanced technology has enabled technicians to gather data from every area of facilities, managers are beginning to rethink the KPIs they include on their dashboards.
Which begs several important questions: What would you measure if you could measure anything about the performance of your facilities? What data related to your department have you always wanted but could not figure out how to gather? How would you put these pieces of data to use? Here is where networking becomes crucial. Whatever data you need but can't find, chances are some other manager has figured out how to gather and report it in ways that you can access. While Big Data is a large movement, it also is moving in small, focused steps based on the needs of individual facilities. To take advantage of it, it might be in a manager's best interest to think small.
Dan Hounsell offers observations about trends in maintenance and engineering management and the evolving role of managers in facilities.
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